A certain Cal football star slept in my freshman dorm room. I won’t tell you who it is if you don’t ask, but for simplicity’s sake let’s just call him Mr. Cal Football. It’s one of my favorite college-related claims to fame.
Thankfully (or maybe not thankfully depending on how you look at it) he wasn’t with me or in my bed or anything. One of my freshman roommates had a thing with him, so that’s how I was graced with this campus celeb’s slumberly presence.
This anecdote is only one of my many ridiculous dorm stories from freshman year. I’m only a sophomore now, but as I approach the halfway point in my college career, I look back and seriously die laughing at some of the things that have happened to me. My Unit 1 double was certainly the scene of some strange happenings.
Case in point is college claim to fame numero dos: The Hallucination Incident.
The same roommate who had the fling with Mr. Cal Football was also fond of a few other dudes. She was respectful enough to never sexile me completely, but I often came home to a new dude watching some cheesy movie with her, only to forget his name and try to learn another shortly after.
Anyways, one night I was woken up at 5:00am to some fishy noises coming from the other side of our room. I did the standard shuffle-around-in-your-sleep-to-make-your-presence-known move, hoping that the weird noises would stop. They didn’t.
Feeling more awkward than ever, I let out a painfully fake sounding cough. The noises subsided, so I opened my eyes to check out the scene.
Now, let me precede this by saying that I definitely have terrible vision, plus it was really dark… But honest to God, I swear I saw the fuzzy shape of a guy sitting on the bed against the wall.
Not standing to be exposed to this mental abuse any longer, I promptly picked up my pillow and blanket and headed out to the floor lounge to get a few more hours of sleep.
So you might be able to predict how this story ends. There was no guy in the room. My roommate texted me the next day asking why I had slept in the lounge. After a morning of raging to everyone on our floor about how mad I was that she would do that to me, I was suddenly silenced. I texted back “You had a guy in the room and it made me uncomfortable,” to which she replied, “Wait, what guy?”
My roommate had never lied to me before, so I had no reason to believe that she would now. I had legitimately and completely straight up hallucinated this entire incident.
But something I left out of this tale is the fact that she was actually roommate number two. My freshman abode was a double that was first occupied in the Fall by myself and a different roommate, who I will call The One That
Moved Out (TOTMO?). The story of TOTMO is fairly simple – we met via Facebook and decided to list each other as roommates that fateful summer before Freshman year.
My selection was based off of one thing – is she normal, and does she snore? TOTMO passed the test, and things started off great. Welcome Week was filled with nights out and laughs. We giddily went through sorority recruitment together.
We joined different chapters, and things were fine … until they weren’t. A series of miscommunications led to the end of our friendship, but I thought our living situation was tolerable, so I made the decision not to move into my sorority house for the spring.
She decided otherwise. I got the text about her decision the minute my plane landed 3,000 miles away from Berkeley in Boston at the start of Winter Break. Devastation set in.
But in the end, I was alright. TOTMO was replaced with a new roommate, and I got the chance to say I’ve slept in the vicinity of a potential future celebrity. To be honest, when I lived with TOTMO I had no idea how to be a good roommate. I let every little thing get to me, and we never talked about our tiffs.
What it all comes down to is that you can’t take freshman year too seriously. No matter how hard you try, something is going to go weird about your freshman living experience, and probably your sophomore living experience too. You just gotta take it in and reflect on it, and ultimately learn to laugh about it.
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